Marketing

This week in content marketing: thinking about teams

This week — inspired by our new Team View feature — we’ve been thinking a lot about teams and how to help them work together well.

Going ProSara Critchfield – founding editor of media site Upworthy.com – acknowledges that while most managers want employees to be curious and experimental, they also like the control of safe and predictable processes. But the two don’t often go together and as her site grew to 50 million readers in just two years thanks to a dedication to experimentation, Critchfield decided that “best practices are for amateurs”.

She believes if you want teams to be innovative you need to encourage a creative, “lab” mentality rather than build your business around processes. She outlines some…errr…not-best practices in this HBR article. At Hightail, we’re all for a “co-lab” mentality and our 4 ways to foster collaboration is a great accompaniment to Critchfield’s excellent piece.

Address the stressor The right mentality is essential to innovation and so too is the right environment. If your team’s attempts to be creative run up against constant roadblocks, their stress levels build and their ability to innovate crumbles.

This Entrepreneur article is a useful guide to managing burnout and offers three practical tips for managing employee stress. We’d add that barriers to effective collaboration can be very stressful and suggest three remedies to killing major collaboration pain points.

Assemble the A-Team The principles of good teamwork can seem obvious but it’s always worth reviewing how your teams are organized, communicate and collaborate to ensure you’re working together as effectively as possible.

This post from our own archive offers eight great tips for better teamwork. And if you want to update the introduction’s sporting analogy to something more topical, how about “ensure your next project team is more Barcelona than PSG”.

That was our week in content marketing. What caught your eye recently? Share your links in the comments below.

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